The folks working on the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s Colorado River Basin Water Supply and Demand Study last week published a striking new graph (figure 2 in this pdf) pointing out our dilemma: It’s an attempt to splice together the latest version of the Bureau’s now-ubiquitous graph of historical supply and demand with the latest projections from …

Continue reading ‘Yo! Over here! Not much water in the Colorado River! What should we do?’ »

When it comes to water, we westerners seem to be a distrustful lot: Water politics in Colorado and in western Wyoming have long been driven by this one, nagging fear: that California was getting something to which it was not entitled – and might get accustomed to it. Squatter rights, if you will, bolstered by …

Continue reading ‘Dipping more drinking straws into the Colorado River’ »

In the western United States, water use and water rights questions associated with Native American communities are a major factor in the region’s future. Under federal law, these communities are entitled to substantial but often unquantified amounts of water. Planning for the future often gets tangled up in these questions. For example: Not all tribes …

Continue reading ‘Water use in Indian Country’ »

Back in the 1950s, the Colorado River, at least a bit of it, used to regularly reach the “Southern International Boundary” – the river bed near San Luis where it stops being the US-Mexico border and travels solely in Mexico. Even during the driest bits, when Lake Mead was dropping during the late ’50s, at …

Continue reading ‘Not much river left’ »

Those pesky tree ring scientists are at it again, spoiling a perfectly good party. Stephen Gray and colleagues have taken a dig into runoff over the last 1,000 years on three major Colorado River tributaries, adding a new level of granular detail to something that already seemed apparent: Runoff during the 20th century, when we …

Continue reading ‘the problem with living in good times’ »

Tony Perry has a nice take-out in the Los Angeles Times this weekend outlining the state of play in discussions over the fate of the Quantification Settlement Agreement and the water deal contained therein between the Imperial Irrigation District and San Diego. It does a good job of highlighting the dilemma – San Diego has …

Continue reading ‘Imperial Valley – What’s Plan B?’ »

The scale of the “third straw” Las Vegas is poking into Lake Mead is one of those made-for-journalism anecdotes that tells the story of a great western city’s thirst. The new intake is insurance that Vegas can still get water from Mead if lake levels drop below intakes one and two, a tacit admission of …

Continue reading ‘Drilling for water, Vegas style’ »

With the latest monthly report from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, we now have end-of-water year numbers, and a chance to take stock. It’s been a terrific year for water supply on the Colorado River system: Lake Mead ended the year with a surface elevation of 1,116 feet above sea level, up 32 feet from …

Continue reading ‘There seems to be a lot of water in Lake Mead. Relatively speaking.’ »